Memory, trauma
“The past is a different country. They do things
differently there.” (L. P. Hartley)
• “Only that which never ceases to hurt will stay in
the memory” (Nietzsche: The Generalogy of
Morals)
“The horror of that moment,” the king went on, “I
shall never, never forget!”
“You will though”, the Queen said, “if you don’t
make a memorandum of it”. (Through the
Looking-Glass)
Memory and philosophy: Plato
• MNEME
• “what we call learning is really just
recollection” (Phaedo)
• ANAMNESIS: conscious effort to retrieve
Plato: storage/retrieval models
• (1) block of wax in the mind
• We hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas
and “imprint them on it as we might stamp the
impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so
imprinted we remember and know so long as the
image remains, whatever is rubbed out or has not
succeeded in leaving an impression we have
forgotten and do not know”
• (2) aviary stocked with birds
Aristotle
• How is sg absent (the past) still present?
• Do we recall the thing or its image?
• Perception and memory (Benjy in The Sound
and the Fury)
Enlightenment, modernity
memory as the key to identity (Locke, Hume)
St. Augustine (4th-5th cent.)
„the fields and vast palaces of memory”
„a spreading limitless room within me”
„Who can reach memory’s utmost depth?
Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to
my nature. In fact, I cannot totally grasp all
that I am. The mind is not large enough to
contain itself”
Romanticism
• Memory: key to selfhood - sich erinnern, se
souvenir/rappeler, recordar(se)
• Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ – the sheer
difficulty of evoking, of rejoining my past self
• Memory disturbances (grief, nostalgia, split
minds)
Erinnerung vs Gedächtnis
• Memory as interiorisation, accumulation of
experience
• vs
• Memory as a mechanical filing system, an
archive, sg artificial, prosthetic
• “Theuth came to the king (Tamus) and exhibited his
arts... when it came to writing, Theuth said: ‘This
discipline, my King, will make the Egyptians wiser and
will improve their memories: my invention is a recipe
for both memory and wisdom’. But the king said: ‘...The
fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in
the souls of those who have learned it because they
will not need to exercise their memories, being able to
rely on what is written, using the stimulus of external
marks that are alien to themselves rather than, from
within, their unaided powers to call things to mind. So
it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that
you have discovered.” (Plato)
Two kinds of memory
• Henri Bergson:habit-memory
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “It is through the
body that we have access to the past” –
earlier moments of bodily experience become
the history of my current being in the world;
time is sedimented on my body (the lived
body is a hollow in being, a hollow where time
is made)
Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
• “It is a labour in vain to attempt to evoke our
past: all the efforts of our intellect must prove
futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside
the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in
some material object (in the sensation which
that material object will give us) of which we
have no inkling. And it depends on chance
whether or not we come upon this object
before we die.”
Proust/2
• „petites madeleines”
• “this old, dead moment which the magnetism of
an identical moment has travelled so far to
importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very
depths of my being”
• “And suddenly, my memory revealed itself”
• the entire forgotten chapter of his childhood
miraculously reemerges, “taking shape and
solidity, sprang into being, town and gardesn
alike, from my cup of tea”
• the mystique of memory
20th century
• Memory: an obsession
• (1) Modernity seen as a memory crisis
• (2) pervades politics, everyday life, popular
culture
• (3) emphasis on malfunctionings, memory
disorders (amnesia, trauma, nostalgia)
• (4) the idea of collective/cultural memory
WW1 and modern memory
• (1) mourning; testing traditional languages of loss
• (2) trying to account for, record, archivise, testify to the
slaughter
• (3) the contrary desire to forget the savagery (the
price of resuming civilised existence)
• (4) a catastrophe, a disaster → absolute separation
from the past
• (5) nostalgia for prelapsarian Edwardian England,
• (6) emblem: returning (shell-shocked) soldiers: figures
of amnesia, ghosts
Psychoanalysis and memory
•
•
•
•
Hysteria: “patients suffer from reminiscences”
Symptoms: memory symbols Erinnerungssymbole
(1) Construction of the past
(2) archaeological work; alien internal images
(dreams, symptoms)
• (3) trauma: the past invades the present
(remembering vs repetition)
(4)reinterpretation of forgetting
Harald Weinrich: “With Freud, forgetting lost its
innocence” Cui prodest?
screen memories
Maurice Halbwachs: Les cadres sociaux de la
mémoire (On Collective Memory)
• It is (only) as members of a community that we
remember
• All memories are individual and collective at the
same time
• the individual mind: imbued with frameworks
common to the community
• It is in the community that we acquire, recall,
recognize and localize our memories
Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Winston Smith buying a diary
• ‘Nothing remained of his childhood except a
series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against
no background and mostly unintelligible’
• Visit to the proles
• ‘The old man’s memory was nothing but a
rubbish-heap of details’
Ritual as collective memory
Athens: birth of Erichthonius
• Daughters of Cecrops / disobedience
• Ceremony: 2 little girls: Hersephoroi (bearers
of dew) Arrhephoroi (bearers of the
unspeakable)
• Enactment of a mystery /of collective guilt
Ritual as collective memory
• Jan Assmann - rituals: repetition and
representation
• appearance of writing: shift to representation
• Imitation, performance → interpretation
Memorial places
• Halbwachs: sacred places
• Aleida Assmann: Gedänk(en)ort
• ‘This pillar knows things that I don’t
remember’ (W. Sebald)
• Connection not with the sacred but with the
past (making the past transcendent)
• Four types: tomb, ruin, monument, traumatic
place
• Mary Douglas: the home as a ‘memory
Politics and ethics of (collective)
memory
• ‘transformation of memory into catastrophe’
(Terdiman)
• The sheer horror of history (Holocaust
memory as prototype)
• Remembering+testifying witnessing
• Official memory - counter-memory (Foucault)
• Silenced, erased histories, memories
• Political and ethical stake of remembering
Postmodern memory/1
• Ethics and politics
• Michael Rothberg: multidirectional memory
• Holocaust memory – articulating other
erased memories
• Anne Michaels: Fugitive Pieces
• Caryl Phillips: The Nature of Blood
Postmodern memory/1
Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch)
• Familial memory
• Art Spiegelman: Maus
• “Photographs offer a prism through which to
study the postmodern space of cultural
memory composed of leftovers, debris, single
items that are left to be collected and
assembled in many ways, to tell a variety of
stories, from a variety of often competing
perspectives” (Hirsch)
Eperjesi Ágnes: Family Album
Eperjesi
Eperjesi
Fredric Jameson: past flattened into a collection
of styles
Heritage: salvaging the past and staging it as a
visitable experience. (Bella Dicks)